An alternative history of English

Hello, and thanks for reading my language blog!

You'll be pleased to know I'm back on the Blogosphere after another extended break. I'm still very much alive and able to type, and I definitely have not abandoned my blog for good.

Now, please put your imagination caps on for a while, as this will help you understand where I'm going with my next series of articles:

This is an imagination cap.

Suppose, for a moment, that the Norman invasion of England in 1066 had never happened. Things would probably have turned out a bit differently. You could also try to suspend disbelief and imagine that the Viking invasions and immigration had never happened.

Of course, both of these events have changed history. Whole dynasties of English monarchs since 1066, most notably the Normans and the Plantagenets, were of French origin. William the Conqueror confiscated lands from the Anglo-Saxon nobles and gave the land to his French followers. The Normans built hundreds of castles to consolidate their new territory, many of which still stand today.

For centuries after the Norman conquest, the court, government and nobility of England were primarily made up of people of French origin. Of course, Norman French was introduced as the language of the elite.

The linguistic impact of the Norman conquest on English was huge. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of words were borrowed from Norman French in the years following the conquest. Since then, there has been a steady stream of French words entering the English language. First, these loanwords were borrowed from Norman French, but in later centuries, Parisian (or Standard) French became the main source.

I'm going to show you what the English language could have looked like if the Norman conquest had never happened. I do think we would have borrowed some words from French, because most European languages have done so, but there's no way that the vocabulary of English would have been influenced by French to the extent that it has.

Let's not forget the influence of Old Norse on English, either. The Norse-speaking Vikings began their raids on England in 790 AD and these continued until the Norman Conquest. That it is not to say that the Vikings were all bloodthirsty berserkers who were only interested in looting and pillaging. After all, many Vikings settled in Britain, and frequently intermingled with the existing Anglo-Saxon population.

Although Old Norse has not contributed as many borrowed words in English as French has, many of the words that have been taken from Old Norse belong to the very basic layer of vocabulary. Did you know that such everyday words as both, take, egg, ill, flat, happy, loose, low, they, until and want are of Old Norse origin? Most placenames ending in -by, -thorpe and -thwaite have an Old Norse etymology.

The influence of Old Norse on English ran deep indeed, and it's certainly true that the English language would be quite different without the words that it has borrowed from its Germanic cousin.

What I plan to do in my next few articles is remove most (but not all) Norse and French loanwords from English, and replace them with words of native Old English (Anglo-Saxon) origin. I will also look at the ways in which Old Norse and French might have influenced the grammar of English.

The end result could give you some idea of what the English language may have looked like if the Viking invasions and the Norman conquest had never happened.